by Frances
They were, Mrs. North told him, almost sternly, talking about blueprints. Not about her.
“And baked apples,” she said. “And an alibi.” She paused. “And you know,” she said, “it really is an alibi. Not something people just call an alibi. He really was somewhere else when it happened. He must have been—punching the time clock, maybe. Where he worked. Or perhaps actually working.”
Mullins was not really happy about it. But he said “yeah” and added that he guessed it was.
“Since it must have been after the Harper girl came in,” Pam pointed out. “Because there weren’t any apples earlier, and a full tray came in when Cleo did and Frances had eaten one. The poor kid!” Pam thought a moment. “It’s kind of sadder that way,” she said. “Nothing but a baked apple at the last, with all the other things—all the good things—in the world. Things with fine, sharp tastes and good smells and all the strange things she’s never—And in the end just a baked apple.”
She was not in the least facetious. Mullins didn’t think she was. He thought it over and said, “yeah,” again.
“Only,” he said, “maybe she liked them better than anything else.”
Pam shook her head.
“That wouldn’t be possible,” she said. “Baked apples aren’t like that, even if you like them. They’re just—all fight. At best that’s all they are. Not like olives or—or—something with a new sauce. Or beefsteak outdoors over charcoal. Or—”
“Or cornbeef,” Mullins said, suddenly. “The kind that crumbles, sort of. I guess you’re right, Mrs. North.”
They looked at each other, a little hungrily. Sergeant Mullins was the first to break it.
“Of course,” he said, but without conviction. “There could have been another tray of apples. Making three in all. And she could have had one from that. While Martinelli was still there.”
“I don’t believe it,” Pam said. “Neither do you, Sergeant. Not really. That would be too many baked apples. Altogether.”
There was, Mullins told her, a way to check up on that. They were walking through the snow, away from the safe, uninteresting neighborhood picked by the founders of Breckley House as appropriate to safe and uninteresting lives. They were looking, without optimism, for a taxicab.
“Remember how many there used to be?” Pam said, waving at one which went on disdainfully, with successful passengers gloating behind windows. Mullins agreed without emphasis, giving matter-of-fact acknowledgment to departed luxuries. He was looking for something else; he found it in the lights of a cigar store, doubly dimmed out by the falling snow. He led Mrs. North to it. It had a soda fountain, too, and Mrs. North sat promptly.
“Oh yes,” she said, “and really good vichyssoise. But meanwhile, I’m going to have coffee. Aren’t you, Mr. Mullins?”
Mullins said he was, in a minute. He pulled out a notebook and went through its pages, said “yeah” abstractedly and found a telephone booth. He was gone a good while, and Mrs. North drank coffee. Then he came back and sat beside her.
“Two was all,” he said. “I got the manager and he got somebody else—the baked apple department, I guess. There was only two trays of apples, so I guess you’re right.”
Pam nodded and said she thought so. Because otherwise, what was the sense of it?
“And sometimes I don’t,” Mullins said. “There’s sometimes, Mrs. North, that you stop me.” He paused. “Cold,” he said. “How’s about some coffee, bud?”
Bud produced coffee. Mullins drank. Mrs. North seemed impatient.
“Well,” she said. “We’ll have to go tell him. The poor kid.”
“In the morning,” Mullins said. “After we see the loot.”
“Now,” Mrs. North insisted. “We don’t have to get him out, or anything. But we have to talk to him right away, now that we know he didn’t do it.”
“Why?” said Mullins, gulping.
“Because,” Pam said, “he knew the girl. So maybe he knows why somebody would want to kill her.” She paused.
“And if he does,” she added, simply, “I think we ought to ask him. Don’t you?”
Sergeant Mullins looked at her, started to say something, withdrew it and shook his head.
“Sometimes—” he said, indefinitely. He abandoned it. “O.K., Mrs. North,” he said. “He’s in the precinct. We’ll talk to him like you say.”
VII. Tuesday, 11:31 P.M. to Wednesday, 1:15 A.M.
Jerry North said, in the tone of one whose worst expectations are more than fulfilled, “What? What, Pam?”
“The police station,” Pam told him, patiently. “Only not to stay.”
“Well,” Jerry said, “that’s good. That’s fine. Why, Pam?”
“Because it was just as we thought,” Pam told him, using a generous plural to mollify. “He couldn’t have done it on account of the apple. Only it’s too complicated to go into on the telephone, Jerry. And now we’re going over to tell him he didn’t do it.”
“Doesn’t he know?” Jerry said. “I mean—do you have to tell him?” He paused, apparently listening to himself. “Anybody knows if he didn’t commit a murder,” Jerry went on, clarifying. “It isn’t as if everything had gone black, Pam.”
“Gone black?” Pam said, interested. “What’s gone black?” She paused momentarily in turn. “Jerry!” she said. “Did you eat something?”
“Eat something?” Jerry said. “What do you mean, did I eat something?,”
“Ptomaine,” Pam said. “That’s what it sounds like. All right, in just a minute.”
“Pamela!” Jerry said, with severity. “What’s happened to you, for God’s sake?”
“Mullins,” Pam said. “Knocking on the door. Of the booth. He seems to think we ought to go to jail.”
“Maybe—” Jerry said, and broke off. “I think you’d better come home, Pam. After all; Dorian’s here.”
“Good,” Pam said. “Put him on, won’t you, dear?”
“Not Bill,” Jerry explained. “Just Dorian. Waiting. Also, I’m waiting. Pretty soon Bill will be here.”
“Tell him to wait,” Pam said. “I’ll have Mullins bring the Martinelli boy, too. Because even if he didn’t himself, maybe he knows. I mean, if anybody murdered you, for example, dear, I’d know right away. Because I know so much about you.”
“Well,” Jerry said, a little helplessly. “It seems—I mean.…”
“Or,” Pam said, “if somebody murdered me, then you’d know. Sauce for the goose, you know.”
“No,” Jerry said, firmly. “I don’t know. It’s much more difficult over the telephone, somehow. I think you’d better come home.”
“Of course,” Pam said. “Right away, dear. That’s what I called up about. As soon as we’ve been to jail. All right, I’m just hanging up. I was explaining to Jerry about the apple.”
“What?” Jerry said.
“Mullins,” Pam told him. “Impatient, I was just telling him I was just hanging up. Goodbye, Jerry. Tell Bill to wait and that we’re bringing the Martinelli boy. And you can play three-handed bridge, or something.”
“I hate—” Jerry said, just as she was hanging up. She quickly took the receiver off the hook and said, “What, dear?” But this time, apparently, Jerry had hung up.
“Three-handed bridge,” Pam said to herself as she emerged from the booth. “He says he’d rather match quarters.”
“Sure,” Mullins said. “Who wouldn’t? Or gin. Three-handed bridge is a low sort of game.”
“All right,” Pam said. “Why don’t we go? We’re going to get the boy and take him over to our place and Bill is going to wait and help us talk to him.”
Mullins looked doubtful, but was carried along. They scuffed through snow for a block, waving fruitlessly at taxicabs. Then they got one. Mullins gave the address of the precinct and they skidded through slush. The lights of the precinct house were dim in the snow fog. It was a red brick building, tall and too thin for its height—like Cleo Harper, Pam thought—and it was a little draw
n away from other buildings, as if other buildings shunned it as a symbol of misfortune. They went through slush across the sidewalk and through double doors and across a worn wooden floor to a desk with a uniformed policeman behind it. Pam waited while Mullins talked to the policeman; she followed Mullins through a doorway into a small, grimy room with plastered walls painted an unhappy green and with one window which had bars across it. After a few minutes they brought Franklin Martinelli into the room.
He was a little under middle height and his shoulders were broad under a blue shirt open at the neck. He had a dark, square face and damp black hair and he looked at them with defiance and hatred—and bitterness. He stood with his feet a little apart and fixed black eyes on Mullins and said nothing.
“Sit down, kid,” Mullins said.
The boy’s gaze did not waver. He did not sit down. It was as if Mullins had not spoken. Mullins waited. After a moment he spoke again.
“I don’t care, kid,” he said. “Sit down. Or stand up. It ain’t my feet.”
Mullins sat down. The boy—Pam thought he could not be over eighteen and that he was too angry for eighteen—stood without saying anything.
“This lady,” Sergeant Mullins said, with a half gesture toward Pam. “This lady—Mrs. North—thinks you didn’t kill the girl. Maybe she’s got something.”
“What the hell,” the boy said, without inflection. “What the hell, copper.”
“She was alive when you left,” Pam said. “The sergeant knows that too, Mr. Martinelli.”
The boy’s black eyes fixed on her, unwinking.
“Yeah?” He said. “Yeah?”
But the voice was not quite the same.
“Because she ate—something,” Pam said. “And it had to be after you left. So there was somebody else with her. Somebody else killed her.”
“She was smiling,” the boy said. His voice still had little inflection. “Like I said, she was smiling. She—”
Suddenly he turned his back to them and walked over to the wall near the window and put one arm against the wall and rested his head on it. With the other hand he made a fist and then he began, softly, as if he were counting, to pound the wall with the fist. He said nothing more, but hid his face from them and pounded the wall softly, as if he were counting with the beats. Pam watched him a moment and half stood and then sat down again. She and Mullins sat and looked at the boy and he went on softly pounding against the wall. And then he ended it, with his fist against the wall, and let the fist slide slowly down as if he were very tired. And then, finally, he turned to them again. He had been crying, but he made no sound.
For a moment nobody said anything and now the boy looked at the floor. Then Pam spoke.
“We want to find out who did it,” she said. “Who did—that—to Frances. We want you to help us.”
“I wanted us to get married,” the boy said. “Before I go in the army. She—she was thinking about it. I tried to make her hurry up and she wouldn’t have it and I got mad, maybe. But just because I wanted us to get married. Like you do at people you like. At a girl you like.”
“Yes,” Pam said. “I know what you mean.”
“To hell with it,” the boy said. “What good does that do, lady?”
Sergeant Mullins started to say something but Pamela North stopped him with a gesture.
“None,” she said. “It doesn’t do any good, Franklin. Except I do know what you mean.”
“Thanks,” the boy said. He said it with irony. “Thanks, lady. So you know what I mean.”
“And,” Pam said, patiently, “that you didn’t do it. I know that, too.”
“O.K.,” the boy said. “So I’m not in jail, huh?”
The boy’s young, heavy irony curled the words. Pam North seemed not to hear it.
“No,” she said. “We’re going to take you out.”
“Yeah,” the boy said. “To where?”
“To my apartment, first,” Pam said. “Sergeant Mullins and I. So Lieutenant Weigand can talk to you. Then, I think, wherever you want to go. Isn’t that right, Sergeant?”
It was, Mullins qualified, up to the Loot. But his tone did not discourage the idea. The boy looked at him hard and then looked a little puzzled.
“Is this a new one?” he said. “A new racket the cops have got? With the lady in it?”
Pam said, still patiently, that it wasn’t a racket. The boy still looked at Mullins. He looked at Mullins as if he did not like what he saw and Mullins looked at him as if he were part of the wall. When Mullins spoke, his voice, too, was without expression.
“You’re a very smart kid,” he said. “A very smart kid. You know all the answers. Come on.”
The boy looked at Mullins, decided Mullins meant it, and came on. They got his jacket and a thin overcoat and stood by him as he put them on; they got a little pile of things from the property clerk—an envelope with a letter in it, some change, a flat billfold, a single key. Pam looked at the key and thought it was odd, and pathetic, for a boy to have only one key—only one thing of his own, or a little room of his own, to be locked and unlocked. Pam had keys, even in the little leather case in her purse, to say nothing of desk drawers at home, whose keyholes were ancient, never to be solved, mysteries.
As they went across town through the snow in a borrowed precinct car she thought about keys, and how some people have a great many so that they can lock up a great many things—sometimes including things they no longer owned, like early cars which had departed and left stray keys behind as mementos—and some people had only one key. Some people, probably, had no keys at all, which was a kind of dispossession. Or a symbol of dispossession.
The precinct car drew up in front of the brick walkup downtown where the Norths lived. Pam, fumbling in her purse, discovered that she had apparently lost the little leather case which held all her keys.
“There is a symbolism here, if I can only work it out,” she thought, and rang the bell so that Jerry would click them in. Jerry clicked them in. His clicking, Pam thought, sounded relieved and impatient. She smiled secretly to herself, pleased, and tucked the key symbolism away to think of later.
Nobody, looked approvingly at Mrs. North or Franklin Martinelli and Bill Weigand looked with marked disapproval at Sergeant Mullins. Bill Weigand’s voice was cold.
“Well, Sergeant?” he said. “Well?”
Mrs. North answered quickly for Mullins, who looked at her hopefully.
“I made him, Bill,” she said. “Because we found out it couldn’t have been Franklin and of course, if he isn’t a murderer he’s a witness. Because he knew the girl better than anybody. And so—”
Mullins looked at Lieutenant Weigand with some anxiety.
“It ain’t regular, Loot,” he said, breaking in. “I don’t argue it’s regular.” He looked at Mrs. North and then back at the lieutenant. “Mostly things aren’t regular any more,” he said, and now he was clearly wistful. “Not like they used to be.” He looked through the lieutenant, remembering. “Back before we knew the Norths,” he said. “When we were just cops, sort of. And—”
“And you could round up a couple of guys and give them a going over,” Pam finished for him. “We know about the good old days, Sergeant. And we’re sorry. Aren’t we, Jerry.”
“Yes,” Jerry said, without equivocation in word or tone.
“Well,” Pam said. “A little sorry. But it seems to me we all meet very interesting people nowadays.”
“Yeah,” Mullins said. “Only most of them are dead.”
Franklin Martinelli looked from one speaker to another and his eyes stopped on Bill Weigand.
“Look,” he said. “What the hell goes on, Lieutenant?”
Weigand told him, crisply, that he could drop that tone. Plenty went on; Martinelli was not yet out of what went on.
“But he is,” Pam said, and told why. She told of Cleo Harper and what Cleo had said, and explained how that made it impossible that Franklin Martinelli could have killed Frances. “Be
cause she thought—thinks—he did do it,” Pam North pointed out. “So she must have been telling the truth because what motive would she have had?”
Bill Weigand listened and when Mrs: North finished he was nodding slowly. He looked at Martinelli, still dark and angry; expressing anger even while he stood and said nothing. Bill said the story helped Martinelli.
“Yeah,” Martinelli said. “Maybe you’ll lay off me.”
“Maybe,” Weigand said. “Who would have wanted to kill Frances?”
“Harper,” Martinelli said, without kindness. “That Harper—”
“O.K.,” Mullins said. “Can it, kid.”
“Was she?” Pam said, finishing the thought the boy had not finished.
“She’s nuts,” Franklin Martinelli said, still surly. “I don’t get dames like that. What did she want? Always trying to break things up.”
“Between you and Frances?” Weigand asked.
The boy nodded.
“Like Franny belonged to her,” he said. “Like I was something—I don’t know. Like I was a disease or something. I didn’t get it. Like she wasn’t a girl—the Harper. What’s the matter with her?”
Weigand said he didn’t know. He looked at Pam North, who looked at Jerry. Jerry raised his eyebrows.
“What’s the matter with her, Pam?” Jerry said.
Pam North’s slender shoulders moved slightly.
“It seems to me,” Dorian Weigand said, fro deep in a chair, “that were all being very innocent. And that it doesn’t become us.”
“No,” Pam said. “It isn’t that clear. I mean the way you mean—it isn’t as clear as that. It’s a lot of things all mixed together.”
Martinelli grew red and angrier. He said, suddenly, that they made him sick.
“She wasn’t like that,” he said. “Franny wasn’t like that.”
Nobody, Pam told him, had said she was—had suggested she was. Like anything. But Frances McCalley’s being one way did not prevent Cleo Harper’s being another. In theory, at any rate. But Pam didn’t, she said—she repeated—think it was a simple thing at all, even from the point of view of Cleo Harper. Particularly from the point of view of Cleo Harper.
